The Housing Market and Social Class Segregation in British CitiesAuthor(s): J. H. JohnsonSource: Area, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1975), pp. 54-55Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20000937 .

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54 Reports of symposia

to stimulate the flow of information between geography departments in the London area. The Chairmen summed up the session by suggesting that, first, an annual residen tial conference should be run for all entering into postgraduate geography work. This

would allow people to get to know those working in their field at an early stage of research. Secondly, it was necessary to systematize the flow of information between geography departments. At present this flow was far too patchy. Lastly they felt that communication was inhibited by the ethos of debate which insists that research is only discussed when finely polished reports can be presented. There was a need for alternative and more informal forums where such an ethos did not prevail.

Peter Clark(LSE) Ian Cook (Liverpool Polytechnic)

Alternatives in higher education Organizer: David Preston (Leeds)

The main purpose of this session was to encourage participants to discuss what they were engaged in doing by way of new or successful teaching methods and to explore what problems we have in common in educating students about geography. This session was more successful than the rather impromptu meeting in Norwich in 1974 in getting people to air their views and share their worries. Thirty or forty people attended from a range of institutions and with considerable differences in age, seniority and outlook. Andy Blowers (Open University) spoke of the work associated with the preparation of the sophisticated teaching packages that make up OU courses. He suggested that we might learn from the care with which course aims were speci fied and objectives defined and large first year university courses might make use of at least some OU material. No-one reacted to this. Other OU staff present supported

Blowers and commented on the important differences between students at the OU and conventional universities. Speakers seemed impressed by the OU work but unwilling to admit that much was relevant to them.

David Preston (Leeds) reported on an effort to develop a more student-centred course structure in a course on Latin America and on the difficulty of arriving at any realistic measure of student benefit from this organization. Discussion was lively and strayed over problems of assessment, research on teaching methods, the virtues of

Oxbridge tutorials. Some questioned what was wrong with lectures anyway. Several participants referred to their own teaching programmes and reactions to innovation. It was unfortunate that this session coincided with the post-graduate forum which was concerned with similar problems from a different angle. It seemed clear that people were willing to discuss their involvement in education but that a future session might be most productive if organized around a single theme, such as assessment. This will be explored for the Lanchester Conference in 1976. Meanwhile anyone with comments and suggestions is encouraged to write to David Preston.

David Preston University of Leeds

The housing market and social class segregation in British cities Organizer and Chairman: Prof. J. H. Johnson (Lancaster) Contributors: A. A. Kirby (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) Housing market studies: a critical review S. S. Duncan (Cambridge) Research direction in social geography: housing oppor

tunities and constraints

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Reports of symposia 55

G. Gordon (Strathclyde) Changes in the housing market: a discussion based on a case-study of social class segregation in Edinburgh

M. A. Poole (NUU), R. Murray and F. W. Boal (Belfast) Social class and housing class: an exploratory study of residential segregation

B. Morgan (KCL) The housing market and 'family status' segregation in Exeter P. Williams (Reading) The role of institutions in the Inner London housing market:

the case of Islington

In many ways the most fascinating element in this session's papers was the lack of a precise 'fit' between the findings of the various authors. Williams indicated that changes are rapidly taking place in the housing market and in the social class of resi dents in the London Borough of Islington, stressing the role of estate agents and building societies in this process. By way of contrast, perhaps, Morgan's paper on Exeter reached the conclusion that the pattern of household types is better understood in terms of inertia rather than change. Here household types were more related to the age of building than to choices associated with a changing family life-cycle.

Or again, Poole, Murray and Boal argued that it was possible (in Belfast and Cole raine) to recognize eleven different housing types by combining tenure and architec tural characteristics, but that the social-class characteristics associated with these types could be collapsed into two groups. One of these groups consisted of all housing in the private sector, except for terrace houses; and in this group manual workers were under-represented. In the other group manual households were over-represented, and this consisted of public-sector houses plus private-sector terrace houses. This finding could be set against Duncan's examination of housing opportunities and constraints, which concluded that the concept of the housing class should provide a general frame work for empirically-based research into housing opportunities and constraints. He postulated a graded system of status groups defined by their positions in the market and in the social system-clearly a much more complex situation than that apparently found in Northern Ireland.

Kirby's review of housing market studies ranged widely over the literature, stressing the various limitations of economic models of the housing market, of residential development models and of residential location models. The study of the inter-relations between these various components in the pattern of housing emerged as the most important gap in current work. But one of the gaps he did not mention was emphasized in Gordon's study of Edinburgh, which underlined the importance of the nature of the available housing stock and its recent history, since this provides the physical framework within which social class distributions are formed.

Some of the differences between these papers are a direct reflection of the contrasts between empirical and theoretical approach-es to the study of the housing market. But some of the conflicts of evidence are to be explained even more simply. Even within the British Isles there are important differences between the individual cities which have provided the stimuli for the various papers. For example, the turnover of housing in Exeter is clearly less than in Islington. Or again, the social structure and housing classes of Belfast and Coleraine may well be simpler than those in a more complex British conurbation. House-type might well form a useful framework for housing market studies in Edinburgh but housing-class would clearly be of greater validity in, say, London. But what was revealed clearly in all the contributions was that the housing market provides one of the most important keys to the pattern of social classes within cities.

J. H. Johnson University of Lancaster

Rural settlement in the contemporary world Organizer: H. J. R. Henderson (Swansea) on behalf of the Rural Geography Study

Group

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